This page is designed to illustrate why I believe widescren, or letterbox, movies are superior to pan-and-scan movies, those that are regularly found at video rental stores and on television. You probably have noticed that movies in a movie theatre are much wider than they are in height. On the other hand, television screens are relatively square. How do they fit movies onto a TV screen then? There are two methods. The most common method is to literally chop off the edges of the movie so that the movie fits into the TV screen. This is known as pan-and-scan and it is the most common format that rented movies come in. This method loses are large part of the film. The other method is to fit the whole width of the movie on the television screen. This is known as widescreen, or letterbox. This has the side effect of placing empty space above and below the image. However, none of the film is lost in this method. When you rent a movie these days that is not in widescreen, there is usually a warning indicating that the movie has been "modified" (chopped up) in order to fit on your screen.
Please choose from the following movies to compare widescreen versus pan-and-scan:
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